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Broadening ParticipationRESPECT 2015
Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and
Technology
Charlotte, NC, August 13-14, 2015
RESPECT 2015 will be the first international meeting sponsored by the IEEE
Special Technical Community on Broadening Participation. As worldwide demand
for computing professionals increases, it is essential to create a more diverse
workforce in order to drive creativity and provide equal opportunity. Research
on how to address these factors is necessary in order to create a collective
global strategy to improve participation in the computing sciences.
For more information, see http://stcbp.org/RESPECT2015

EducationThe LaTiCE 2015 conference in Taipei, Taiwan at
the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) is still accepting abstracts for
presentations. See http://www.latice2015.org
for more details.

Systems EngineeringSTC-SYSE is working with the Systems Engineering
Research Center (SERC) to study the behavioral, cognitive, and technical skills
that differentiate software engineers from systems engineers.

Social Networking

General

The 38th Annual International Computers, Software & Applications Conference (COMPSAC) is held from July 21-25 in Västerås, Sweden featuring STCs on Education, SmartGrid, and Cloud Computing. Further details: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/COMPSAC

STC Cloud Computing

Web: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cloudcomputing

Message from the new chair, Chunming Rong

Since 2013, the STC has gained a noticeable increase in both number of members and number of co-sponsored events. Several Cloud-Link issues on selected publications have been launched and received popular attention at the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative (CCI) site. Since April 2014, a new steering board of STC CC has been convened. In the coming year, we plan to continue to lay out the network foundation of the STC CC, in order to reach out to more members and events. Among the planned measures, the social media and blogging activities shall be enriched, cloud-related webinars shall be organized, a site on education and tutorial materials and a site on announcements of journal special issues are under development. Further collaboration with other activities at IEEE CCI, for instance the IEEE Intercloud Testbed, are also natural extensions of our activities.

Why are we doing this? Motivation for the area and subject of the course

History of HPC, big data, Moore's Law.

Science domain areas, and problems in each of those areas that motivate the need for this. Where are we today, and what is the projected need later? How are things driven by increases in computing power?

Definition of big data, big compute, why we need both combined

Characteristics of architecture, and how it's linked to changes in computing. Core speeds vs. multiple cores, running in parallel.

Mixture of trends, principles, and implementation in historic context that students should understand.

Parallel application types

4th paradigm

STC Social Networking

Web: http://www.computer.org/stcsn

Social Media Analysis for Crisis Management

STCSN E-Letter Vol.2 No.1, http://stcsn.ieee.net/e-letter/vol-2-no-1

Social networks and media sharing platforms were intensely used during and after recent disasters, e.g., the 2012 Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. or the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda that most heavily hit the Philippines. To a large degree, social media was used by individuals in non-directed ways, rather than by crisis response agencies in an organised manner. Yet, social networks bear a lot of potential to involve the public in crisis response, acquire timely information from the disaster site, improve the operational picture, and help plan and perform response operations.

Integrating Social Media with Video Communication

Welcome to IEEE STCSN's E-Letter volume 2 number 2. This edition discussing a very interesting topic that steadily becomes more important: how does social networking integrate with video communication?

This E-Letter contains contributions from a very interesting European research project, Vconect (http://vconect-project.eu/).

STC Human Computation

Web: http://stchc.ieee.net/

New journal: Human Computation is an international and interdisciplinary forum for the electronic publication and print archiving of high-quality scholarly articles in all areas of human computation, which concerns the design or analysis of information processing systems in which humans participate as computational elements.http://hcjournal.org/

STC on Broadening Participation

… has a new Web site: http://stcbp.org/… come and join now!

General

For general volunteer opportunities and individual open positions within the STC, please see here http://www.computer.org/portal/web/stc/activities

The idea
that the Computer Society should be a collection of flexible communities has
been in front of the Computer Society leadership for roughly eight years. As we have watched social media’s rise, knowing full
well that our own members contributed to its technological underpinnings, we
knew that we needed to use this technology to advance our organization. Our members
are focused on solving the problems that interest them, and they need
communities to help support this work. These communities can be organized
around a variety of activities that support and engage our members. In
creating these communities, we’ve tried to develop organizational
structures that are simple, agile, flexible, and yet effective.

In January
of this year, we institutionalized our Special Technical Communities (STC)
program (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/stc/about),
currently led by Martin Arlitt, to meet this need for flexible organizations
that support our members. With roughly 18 communities in operation, the program
is on track to grow rapidly in the coming years. After testing this
program for almost four years, we identified three fundamental principles for
them. First, these groups should be easy to form and easy to terminate when
they are no longer active. Second, they should not interfere with existing
categories of products and services within the Society—for example, you can
form an STC to prepare a Transactions proposal, but once the Transactions
is established, the STC becomes an editorial board that reports to the Publications
Board.

Finally,
as our last principle, we concluded that STCs should have no scope
monopolies. This was one of the more difficult decisions, as scope
monopolies seem to be a foundational idea of IEEE. However, in this case, it
seemed counterproductive that a group of members should be prevented from
working on some topic or be forced to join another community just because others
were working on a similar idea. A Society like ours is very diverse, and each
community within it could have something unique to contribute to the endeavor.
This principle has generated a little controversy among groups that
feel that an honest competition between two STCs might weaken one
or both of them. However, it should be noted that no IEEE conference has a
monopoly on any field, and indeed we see some advantages to having different
groups working on the same problem.

As we
accepted the no-scope monopoly principle, we also recognized that the
communities need unique names or identifiers. We want to avoid the kind of
confusion that comes with having five different cloud computing conferences
with almost the same name. Each STC should have a name that distinguishes it
from the others, even though they are working on similar topics.